Month: March 2017

This month I received some really cool postcrossing cards. They are from all over: England, USA, Germany, Finland, China and Russia. I was really happy to see this beautiful Beatrix Potter postcard. The New York card is really cool as well. There was also nice variation of stamps among these cards and once again the card from Finland didn’t have a cancellation. This seems to happen a lot with cards from Finland…

For me Eastern isn’t a holiday I tend to celebrate but I do love all the Easter Candy and Decorations and it somehow symbolizes Spring as well. So I decided to send a couple of Easter surprise packages to two of my penpals. They might not look very eastery but they are full of yummy goodness 🙂

Of course I have been to Cologne a lot of times as we only live about half an hour out of the city. But I mostly just go into the city to go shopping not to see anything specific. The other weekend we had someone visit us though and as he’d never been to Cologne before we did a bit of sightseeing. We were really lucky and had great weather, it was during our one week of spring/summer time we had so far 😉

First we decided to go up one of the towers in the Kölner Dom. There are a lot of stairs going up and it takes 533 steps to the top. This was only the second time in my life that I went up and both times I was exhausted and needed a couple of breaks – I’m not very fit;).

The view from up there was really great and you could see a lot. Although I don’t have a lot of knowledge about the different things that you can see 😉

Once we were back down we walked past the Heinzelmännchenbrunnen, this fountain tells the story of the Heinzelmännchen. These were little gnome like creatures that helped the people of Cologne by doing some of their work over night. However there was a woman, the tailor’s wife who was too curious and wanted to know who did all the work over night. So she threw peas all over the floor and at night when the Heinzelmännchen came they tripped and fell everywhere making a lot of noise. The tailor’s wife came out to see them right away but after this the Heinzelmännchen never helped the people of Cologne again.

We also walked over the Hohenzollernbridge with all the locks on the side. Similar to so many other bridges around the world people in love come here and close the locks on the bridge. Then they throw the key into the Rhine. By now there are so many locks that in some areas you can’t really see the oldest ones. Every time I walk over the bridge it seems like there are more. However I also have to say that they get more and more ridiculous and there aren’t a lot of locks that actually look nice if you really look closely.

This little letter went out to the UK at the beginning of the month so it should already have found its way to the right mailbox. I also bought new stamps which I am super excited to use on my snailmail now.

Of course I send for postcrossing cards as well. These cards were send to the US, Germany, Czechia and Lithuania. Most of them already arrived so i have to send a few more cards soon. I only have to cards travelling at the moment.

The following cards I bought on my trip to Hamburg and send to my penpals using my new stamps. I absolutely love these ‘Bremer Stadtmusikanten’ stamps, they are special stamps where you pay a bit more and the extra gets donated. The German post has quite a few of these extra stamps (for sports, youth and social services).

About a week ago I went on a short day trip up north to Hamburg. My sister wanted to visit a friend and as I didn’t have to work that day I decided to tag along. It is a bit of a drive from Cologne, about 4 hours.

We spend most of the time just walking around and luckily it didn’t start raining until the very end. When we got to the Elbe we walked through the old tunnel which I’ve never done before. The old Elbtunnel, also called St. Pauli Elbtunnel was build in 1911 and is now mostly used by pedestrians. Although it is still possible for card to use the tunnel however it is a one way tunnel, so for part of the day you can go from the north to the south side and for the other half of the day it’s the other way around.

On the way into the tunnel and all along the walls there are a lot of cool reliefs. All the ones inside the tunnel feature cool ocean creatures.

Apparently I can’t go anywhere without either finding ocean life or something book related and on this trip I got both. While walking through the Speicherstadt I found the Tolkien themed Sail boats called J.R.R. Tolkien and Lothlorien. Of course I had to take some photos of them 😉

Now just a few more photos from our walk featuring the underside of a train way, the Speicherstadt and the ‘Michel’ (Sankt Michaelis Church), the most known Church in Hamburg.

Every year I think I should try to take part in the Month of Letters and every year I fail at the first day. Maybe I’ll try it next year and kind of make a list and be more organised about it. But I did send a few letters as well as a bunch of postcrossing cards last month.

Here are the letters, there were three actually but I forgot to take a photo of the last one. I know the one on the left already arrived and the other one should reach its new home soon.

One evening I also went on to postcrossing and couldn’t stop getting new addresses. In total I send seven cards. After that I was pretty much out of stamps and had to order some new ones that will soon be featured in some snailmail. The cards went to France, Finland, Netherland, Portugal, Estonia, Ukraine and Russia.